A Writer's Notebook (80 page)

The Empire Maker. He was a general, white-haired, with a white toothbrush moustache, tall, well covered but not fat, with a red face, blue eyes and an egg-shaped head. Every morning he went out at six for a ride, and he had a rowing-machine in his room so that he could take some exercise when he came in before he had his bath; as soon as the heat had a trifle diminished he was on the tennis court, and he played strenuously, a very good game (his boast was that he could hold his own against fellers half his age and he preferred singles because they gave you more exercise), till the darkness made it impossible to see the ball; then he went back to his room and rowed on his rowing-machine for a quarter of an hour before bathing. “You have to keep fit in this country,” he constantly said and complained: “I can't get enough exercise.” He had been in India for thirty years. “The only thing that makes India possible is the shootin'. I've had a lot of Shikaris who were first-rate fellers, I mean you could trust them as much as if they were English, first-rate sportsmen, keen as mustard, I mean, except for their colour pukka white men. I'm not exaggeratin', you know. It's a fact.”

Ashwarth. He told me that when he was studying philosophy at college, he could not understand it when his teacher told him that everything was one. How could one say that one was that table and that table was oneself? It didn't seem to mean anything. And then one day he understood. He went to see the great falls that are in Mysore, and for a long way drove in a bus through the jungle. He had never seen big trees before,
and when he sped along the road through a tunnel of green, with the trees towering above him, the sensation was thrilling; then he came to the waterfall; he stood at the edge of a great round pit and in front of him saw that huge mass of water, for it was just after the monsoon, falling from a prodigious height. It gave him an extraordinary emotion, he felt that he was the water, that he was falling like the water and that the water was himself; and he realised that he and the water were one. He is thirty-eight years old, fairly tall for an Indian of the Deccan, perhaps a couple of inches taller than I am, with black hair, naturally waving, that is turning grey, but his face has remained very young, with hardly a wrinkle on the forehead and no lines under the eyes; his eyes are large and swimming, his nose short, but well shaped and ever so slightly fleshy, his mouth is rather large, with full lips; his ears are small, set close to the head, but with long, fleshy lobes, like those, but of course less exaggerated, in the heads of Gautama. His face is clean-shaven, but his beard is heavy, and even after shaving it shows black through his dark, honey-coloured skin. He is not good-looking, but peculiarly attractive from the earnest candour of his expression. His teeth are excellent, very white and regular. His hands are larger than most Indians'.

He is dressed in a cotton dhoty of the cheapest material, a cotton shirt and a Ghandi cap; he wears the scarf that every Indian of condition carries and leather sandals on his bare feet. He speaks English fluently, though he has never been to England, and his voice is sonorous and pleasing. His sincerity is obvious and the goodness of his heart, but I was not so certain of his intelligence. Everything he thinks he has thought out for himself, and he does not know how many of the notions he has hammered out in suffering and meditation are lamentably commonplace. It is disconcerting when with deep feeling he gives utterance to platitudes of the utmost banality. On the other hand now and then he has a charming and even original thought.

He was arrested for a series of seditious articles which he
wrote in the paper he owned, and sentenced to a year's imprisonment. He was put in a separate cell so that he should not contaminate the other prisoners by his conversation, but, though not forced to work, he asked to do so, and made carpets in the workroom with the others. He took his imprisonment very hard. He told me that he used to cry for hours at a time and sometimes would be seized with an irresistible desire to get out, and would beat at the iron bars of his cell door and try to break it open and scream till in exhaustion he threw himself on the mat and fell asleep. At the end of four months the prison food made him so ill that he was taken to the hospital, and spent there the remaining months of his imprisonment. It was then that he decided to renounce his possessions. But his trial had cost a lot of money and during his term in jail his paper did badly, so that when he was set free he found himself deeply in debt. It took him some years to pay his creditors. Then he called his employees together and gave them his paper, his machines, everything, on condition that they should pay his mother thirty rupees a month for her support and for that of his wife, his sister and his two children.

I tried to discover how his family took his decision. He was very casual about their feelings. “They didn't like it,” he said, “but I couldn't help that. You can't do what you think is right without causing somebody pain or inconvenience.” At his birth his horoscope was taken, and the astrologer said that he would either become a very rich, successful man, a king among men, or a sanyasin. For years his ambition had been to make a fortune and a great name for himself; but when he decided to renounce possession of everything he had, his mother, remembering what the astrologer had said, though grieved was not surprised. I asked him what he would answer when his son, on growing up, reproached him for bringing him into the world and instead of giving him the position that might have been his and a good education, had let him be brought up with only elementary knowledge so that he could
be no more than a workman. He smiled quietly. “I think he probably will reproach me,” he said, “but he will have had a home to sleep in and food to eat, which I have provided. I do not see why just because you've brought a son into the world you must waste your life only that he should have a better one. You have rights as much as he has.”

He narrated an incident that took my fancy. The day after he had thus dispossessed himself of all he owned he went to see a friend who lived several miles out of Bangalore. He walked out, and on the way back, feeling tired, he jumped on a passing bus, but then suddenly recollected that he hadn't an anna in his pocket and was obliged to stop the bus and get out. I asked him where he lodged.

“If someone offers me shelter I sleep on the veranda, and if not, under a tree.”

“And food?”

“If someone offers me food I eat it, and if not I go without,” he answered simply.

I came to know him in rather a curious fashion. I was staying in Bombay for the second time and he wrote to me from Bangalore saying he would like to come and see me since he was assured I had something to say to him that it was important to him to know. I replied that I was a very ordinary person, a novelist and nothing else, and didn't think it could possibly be worth his while to travel for two days to see me. He came notwithstanding. I asked him how he had got the railway fare and he told me that he had gone to the station and waited. After some time he got into conversation with a man who was waiting to take the train and told him he was coming to see me, but hadn't the money to pay for a ticket. The man bought him one. I offered to pay for his return journey, but he wouldn't take money from me.

“I shall manage to get back somehow,” he smiled.

We had long talks on two successive days. I was wretchedly conscious all the time that he was expecting from me some high doctrine or at least a significant message. I had nothing to give
him. He could not but have been disappointed, and it may be that I should have done better to fill him up with some highfalutin clap-trap. I couldn't bring myself to do it.

Goa. You drive through coconut groves among which you see here and there ruins of houses. On the lagoon sail fishing-boats, their lateen sails shining white in the brilliant sun. The churches are large and white, their façades decorated with honey-coloured stone pilasters. Inside they are large, bare, spacious, with pulpits in Portuguese baroque carved with the utmost elaboration and altar-pieces in the same style. In one, at a side altar, a priest, a native, was saying mass with a dark-faced acolyte to serve him. There was no one to worship. In the Franciscan Church you are shown a wooden Christ on a crucifix and the guide tells you that six months before the destruction of the city it wept tears. In the cathedral they were holding a service, the organ was playing and in the organ loft there was a small choir of natives singing with a harshness in which somehow the Catholic chants acquired a mysteriously heathen, Indian character. It was strangely impressive to see these great empty churches in that deserted place and to know that day by day with not a soul to listen the priests said mass in them.

The priest. He came to see me at the hotel. He was a tall Indian, neither thin nor fat, with good, somewhat blunt features and large dark liquid eyes, with shining whites to them. He wore a cassock. At first he was very nervous and his hands moved restlessly, but I did what I could to put him at his ease, and presently his hands were still. He spoke very good English. He told me that he was of Brahmin family, his ancestor, a Brahmin, having been converted by one of the companions of St. Francis Xavier. He was a man in the early thirties, of powerful physique and of a fine presence. His
voice was rich and musical. He had been six years in Rome and during his stay in Europe had travelled much. He wanted to go back, but his mother was old and wished him to remain in Goa till she died. He taught in a school and preached. He spent much of his time converting the Sudras. He said it was hopeless now to try to do anything with the high-caste Hindus. I tried to get him to speak of religion. He told me that he thought Christianity was large enough to embrace all the other faiths, but regretted that Rome had not allowed the Indian Church to develop according to the native inclinations. I got the impression that he accepted the Christian dogmas as a discipline, but without fervour, and I am not sure that if one had been able to get to the bottom of his beliefs one would not have found that they were held with at least a certain scepticism. I had a feeling that even though there were four hundred years of Catholicism behind him he was still at heart a Vedantist. I wondered if to him the God of the Christians was not merged, if not in his mind, at least in some obscure depth of the unconscious, with the Brahman of the Upanishads. He told me that even among the Christians the caste system still obtained to this extent that none of them married out of his own caste. It would be unheard of that a Christian of Brahmin extraction should marry a Christian of Sudra extraction. He was not displeased to tell me that there was not in his veins a drop of white blood; his family had always kept resolutely pure. “We're Christians,” he said to me, “but first of all we're Hindus.” His attitude to Hinduism was tolerant and sympathetic.